If one of the objectives of a media room is to create a highly productive experience for journalists, media room products must embrace the fact that the journalists day begins and ends with Microsoft Office™. One importand and overlooked capability in Office™ is Smart Tags support. Imagine providing smart tag subscriptions for journalists so that when a term of phrase is used in your media room, the term is automatically tagged in Word™ documents created or viewed by journalists. Most people think this happens now when press releases and other whitepapers are tagged with embedded links. Smart tags are different - they happen automatically and are based on key terms and phrases that naturally occur in the media room content. Smart tags are so confusing and misunderstood, you have to try it yourself to begin to appreciate how beneficial they may be to your media objectives. As an example, subscribe to the smart tags feed for this Weblog and type the term "media room" into a Word™ document. When you hit the space bar, this term will automatically tag itself. Links from that tag will bring you back to various points in this Weblog. As new terms and items are added to this Weblog, the smart tag interface will reflect those terms in all Microsoft Office documents you use. This [appears] to be a useful model for increasing journalists' productivity while building a pub-sub relationship that offers instant awareness in the context of all work that the journalists engage in. "Anders Brown recognizes Smart Tags as the greatest innovation in Office XP. 'Effectively, it provides the ability to dynamically recognize user input and then link that user input, depending on what that text is, to relevant action.'" -- Microsoft Access Advisor Actually, Anders tells only part of the story. This is publish-subscribe, so it's purely opt-in which means journalists will pick the subscripltions that are most meaningful to their work, and of even greater importance, tags are applied to Office documents that people send you, so you you see other people's documents tagged in ways that are meaningful to you and the terms that are part of your interest base. | 
